Representing the Effects of Product Architecture for Decision-Making in Conceptual Design

The definition of the product architecture has a great impact on customer satisfaction, company strategy, and costs. Whereas these effects mostly become visible in later stages of the product development, most decisions on the product architecture are made early in conceptual design when allocations of functions to solution elements are determined. To support these decisions, many methodical approaches exist, for instance, for functional integration or modularization. However, a big part of those merely addresses single effects of the product architecture. This paper presents a comprehensive approach to draw correlations between targets derived from the specific development task and methods for product architecture design. Therefore, it contributes towards the structuring of existing methods in order to enable the designer to select most suitable methods for specific development tasks.

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